Thornton Wilder (95 page)

Why are we on this earth? How do we live? And why
?
Wilder had asked these questions repeatedly in his published work and in his private life, testing possible answers: We are on this earth to serve, to work, to create, to love and be loved, to struggle and suffer and survive, to constantly evolve—the “Man of the Eighth Day.” We live as best we can, “every, every minute,” as Emily says in
Our Town,
appreciating the gift of life, aware of the universal in the particular—the multitude—without diminishing the value of the particular, the one. Theophilus, like Thornton, studied archaeology in Rome. In a reprise of his earlier allusions to the experience, Wilder writes in his last novel about learning to dig:

 

We dug and dug. After a while we struck what was once a much traveled road over two thousand years ago—ruts, milestones, shrines. A million people must have passed that way . . . laughing . . . worrying . . . planning . . . grieving. I've never been the same since. It freed me from the oppression of vast numbers and vast distances and big philosophical questions beyond my grasp. I'm content to cultivate half an acre at a time.
²⁸

 

Wilder had lived a lifetime exploring the questions, groping for the answers, challenging others and himself in his novels, plays, essays, lectures, journals, letters, conversations. He had lived a robust life out in the world, and a constantly thoughtful, sometimes painful inward life, exploring deep within the self, “learning, struggling, hoping.”
²⁹
There were enduring mysteries, philosophical questions beyond his grasp. But there were also profound illuminations, consolations, wonders, and, he said, awe.

He was still seeking, he revealed in an unfinished, unpublished preface to
Theophilus North,
the novel that mirrored the theological and poetic writings of his brother, Amos:

 

Pascal said: “Neither the sun nor death permit themselves to be looked at fixedly.” At the margin of every man's consciousness is the knowledge that he must die and that the universe must have an end; i.e. the possibility that all the efforts to achieve an orderly world are doomed—that existence is an absurdity and a farce.

What does a man do with his despair, his rage, his frustration?

There is a wide variety of things he does with it. One or the other of them is pictured in each of the chapters of this book.
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According to Theophilus, the fundamental antidote for despair, rage, and frustration is hope: “Hope is a projection of the imagination; so is despair. Despair all too readily embraces the ills it foresees; hope is an energy and arouses the mind to explore every possibility to combat them.”
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WILDER FINISHED
writing the novel a little after midnight on Palm Sunday, April 15, 1973, two days before his seventy-sixth birthday. It was, he said, “a mixture of
Pilgrim's Progress
,
Casanova's Memoir
, and
The Canterbury Tales
.”
³²
He dedicated the novel to Robert Maynard Hutchins, who was still convalescing from major surgery. Hutchins read an advance copy and was pleased. The book was published in the United States in October 1973, and in England in June 1974, and was translated and published in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Russia, Sweden, Brazil, and Japan. A Literary Guild alternate selection, it was also a book club choice in England. The novel stayed on the
New York Times
bestseller list for twenty-six weeks, and was generally the subject of positive reviews. There were many “lemons” as well, however, Wilder said—“unfavorable and even contemptuous reviews,” he wrote to his brother, but to his pleasure he did not receive even “one antagonistic letter from acquaintances or strangers in the public.”
³³

 

“SO I
finished the plaguéd book,” Wilder wrote to Gordon and Kanin April 20, 1973. “I'm accustomed to turn my back on a piece of work once it's finished—but it's something new for me to feel empty-handed and deflated,—to wake up each morning without that sense of the task waiting for me on my desk. Daily writing is a habit—and a crutch and a support; and for the first time I feel cast adrift and roofless without it. I hate this and am going to get back into a harness as soon as I can.”
³⁴
He decided that “every aspect of the literary life is tiresome except those moments when the fancy is disporting itself,” but his spirits lifted when he was “suddenly stung with an idea for a play.” He couldn't wait to get to Martha's Vineyard so he could “get back into a harness” with this new project.
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Wilder's last surviving journal entry holds other clues as to how he expected to get back into harness yet again. In January 1969, in St. Moritz, in an entry headed “
Induration: Have you had your drop of arsenic today?
” he had written about “the practice of taming and domesticating the thing one most dreads.”
³⁶
Because Wilder habitually chose his words deliberately, the word “induration” resonates, announcing a hardening of an idea or position. He was searching, he wrote, for the “word or condensed image to describe one of the methods we resort to [in order to] deal with “The Falling Tile and The Creeping Dark”—not for escaping but rather for “taming and domesticating” fears or dreads. There was currently, he noted, an open confrontation with “the stalking menace” of cancer because of its recently discovered association with cigarette smoking.
³⁷
He had been a chain-smoker for years, and was already suffering from hypertension and other health problems associated with tobacco use. But it was literature, not his health, that prompted his “induration.”

He had believed for years, he wrote, that “detective stories have played the role of accustoming the reader gradually, homeopathically, to horror, evil and sudden death,—as did the Gothic Novel in its day; and the melodrama.”
³⁸
In 1931 he had written a partial draft of a one-act play called “The Detective Story Mystery.” (“Mystery stories
are
wonderful, though,” says one character. “They not only pass the time, but they fill you with the most tremendous shudders.”)
³⁹
In addition to his prolonged study of Edgar Allan Poe's dark stories, Wilder analyzed the

 

popular literature of evil and violence: these works are written within clearly defined conventions: the Man we admire, the Man who is defending us against the evil thing, will not die nor be castrated (the threat of castration lurks behind the James Bond books and perhaps gave the ultimate horror to the Gothic Novel and to the melodrama); the woman-beset will not be raped (a violence doubly exciting because of its ambiguity). The reader-spectator can approach the edge of the precipice without actually looking down into the abyss. The “School of the Little Shudders.”
⁴⁰

 

He recalled in the 1969 journal that he had considered these ideas years earlier, speculating that “the element of fear in any human being could be compared to an atoll—innumerable recurrences of fears, large and small, heaped, superimposed like coral polyps on the fear or fears of earliest infancy,—perhaps derived from the ante-natal fear of escape from a small aperture, the ‘trauma of birth.' ” He believed that an infant “confronts almost hourly the fear of deprivation, abandonment, and so on,” and then must experience “the fear of the dark; the fear of that Interloper (the father that plays so large a part in the Oedipus Complex); perhaps with the increasing consciousness of the loss of gravity, the fear of falling or being dropped.” As these infantile fears accrued and intensified, other fears grew from “reflection and observation: The fear of losing the self (of madness, of not being ‘master of one's own house,' of losing the self in death . . .).”
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“To be continued,” he wrote at the end of this final journal entry—but he did not pick it up again.

 

“I HAVEN'T
been well these last months—had a lumbago (slipped disc) from sheer fatigue after finishing the book and had two separate 9-day hospitalizations,” Wilder wrote to friends in 1973. “Am better now, but limp about cautiously. . . . Had to cancel my trip abroad. I was slow convalescing because I'm so old.”
⁴²
Of his siblings, the eldest and the youngest Wilders seemed to hold up best physically as the years went by. “Amos is the only one among us who is really flourishing,” Thornton had written to Aunt Charlotte in 1967. “Charlotte (don't mention it)
wants
a considerable operation. Isa's just had new x-rays. I go soon for my radio-therapy inspection and may have cataract troubles next year. Of course JANET'S all right.”
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Yet despite his age and his infirmities, Wilder did not seem to fear “losing the self in death.” From the earliest days death had been a multifaceted reality in his work—violent, accidental death; murder; suicide; deaths caused by nature, by disease, by childbirth, by war, by old age. He had long ago accepted death not as the obvious inevitability, but as an organic progression in the cycle of life. As he grew older and his health began to decline, Wilder responded with forbearance and fortitude. When his rheumatism grew “quite bad” during a visit to Paris when he was sixty-nine, he thought he would have to “limp and flinch before stairs” for the rest of his life—but, he wrote to Isabel, “I walked slowly from place to place,—subdued and resigned—and enjoyed myself.” That time the pain disappeared almost completely.
⁴⁴
In 1970, when he heard that his old friend Gene Tunney had been ill and in pain, Wilder wrote to commiserate:

 

No one lives to my time of life without experience of pain—of body and of spirit. My trials of body have not been as extensive or as racking as yours, but I have known them. Each person meets these demands in a different way. I am not a religious man in the conventional sense and cannot claim that consolation that is conveyed in the word “Trial” . . . nor am I willing to endure pain in that spirit that so many noble men and women have done—merely stoically. . . . Physical pain is the summit of aloneness, of solitude.
⁴⁵

 

Well acquainted as he was with pain, Wilder had long ago given up any dread of death. As he kept on working, remembering, imagining, he did not give up his interest in the detective novel. Soon after
Theophilus North
was published, he set to work on a manuscript he titled “Theophilus North, Zen Detective.” (After all, one of Theophilus's nine “Life Ambitions” was to be a detective, and there was a brief mention of “That amazing detective Chief Inspector Theophilus North” in
Theophilus North
itself.)
⁴⁶
Wilder would not live to finish his detective novel, but pages of handwritten drafts survive among his papers, full of notes; revisions; passages written, edited, and edited again. “In my third year at college,” one paragraph reads, “I planned to become an amazing detective. I had read widely in the literature, not only in its fictional treatment, but in technical works dealing with its refined scientific methods. Chief Inspector North would play a leading role among those who shield our lives from the intrusion of evil and madness lurking about the workshop and home.”
⁴⁷

In June 1974 Thornton wrote thoughtfully about how the novel and the novelist function: Every “imagined story about human beings” could be read as parable or myth—“trashy novels and Horatio Alger and Sherlock Holmes right up to
Don Quixote
and
War and Peace
.” Wilder believed that the

 

narrating mind is working in a field of apparently free association—but there is really no such thing as free association. Fabulation opens the trapdoor to the unremitting attempt of the race (through its multiple voices) to render intelligible the movements of the stars, the attractions and repulsions within the family, the behavior of flora and fauna.

For the last million years every story is consciously based upon some story already in existence. . . . For me all stories that work are visceral myths—not for edification (which comes later) but for the reconciliation of tensions.
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He had invested a lifetime of creative energy in telling and retelling “visceral myths,” working in his own distinctive way to “render intelligible the movements of the stars” and the “attractions and repulsions” within the family—from the smallest domestic family unit to the great human family struggling on the “one inhabited star.” From the first page to the very last page Wilder wrote, his work was studded with questions, and from beginning to end, he offered his audience and himself not answers, not edification, but reconciliation. Hope.

 

WILDER MOVED
through the final years of his life with acceptance, serenity, and—most of the time—good humor. In Edgartown in June 1974, in a letter to Dixie, he wrote a lighthearted description of his daily life: When Isabel was not in residence, he tended to relapse into “bachelor squalor,” he said. He made most of his own meals by opening cans and heating up the contents, but he went out to dinner every other night and invited guests to go with him. For years he had enjoyed visiting with friends or strangers in bars around the world. One young woman who found herself talking with him in Edgartown's Harborside Inn bar one summer evening remembered their conversation as the most fascinating of her life.
⁴⁹
Wilder was enjoying the occasional company of the actor Robert Shaw and his family that summer, for Shaw was starring in
Jaws,
which was “being intermittently shot all over the island.” Wilder reported to Dixie that Shaw had honored him with the dedication of his play
Cato Street
(1971), starring Vanessa Redgrave in its short run in London. Each day, Wilder teased, “I take a nap after breakfast and a nap after lunch and three naps between sundown and dawn. But I'm cheerful inside.” He thought his vitality would return to him if he cooperated with it.
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